On Sunday, Tracey and I are taking the Coming of Age class for First Parish in Cohasset and First Parish in Norwell into the Harvard University Art Museum.
The point of the trip is to look at Asian art that depictions deities and sacred objects. This gets interesting because Asian religious/cultural traditions have different understandings of divinity than Christianity (or the other two Abrahamic traditions).
For example — is Buddha a deity, or not? The answer: It depends. In some art works, Buddha appears very human; in other art works, Buddha appears more than human. (Similarly with Jain tirthankaras.) And what about Hindu deities? They are clearly gods, but they also have human-like characteristics.
In Western culture, we tend to think all deities are like the Christian God, transcendent and far above humanity. But Asian art reminds us that there is a scale of divinity, from ordinary mortals through divine humans, and through human-like deities, all the way to transcendent unknowable deities.
So that’s the purpose of the scavenger hunt — look for works of art, then figure out how divine a being is portrayed in the art work. To show you better what I mean, here’s the first page of this year’s scavenger hunt:
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